The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present disclosed embodiments but provided by the disclosed embodiments. Some of such contributions may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions will be apparent from their context.
In modern communication and computer networks, data exchange between programs and computers is a vital element. Information must be exchanged reliably. For this reason, in many applications the recipients of messages are required to acknowledge the successful reception of the messages. This applies especially to networks utilizing packet based transmission.
Many solutions for ensuring reliable transmission have been developed. However, these solutions do not take into account the existence of constrained networks, i.e., networks having limited resources, power and bandwidth available for communication. An example of a constrained network is a machine-to-machine (M2M) network realized using low-power wireless connections.
Especially in large M2M networks with large numbers of devices with small processing power and minimum power consumption it is important to utilize efficient solutions for communication.